Land That Time Forgot, The (Pellucidar Series)

Description

The Land That Time Forgot

byEdgar Rice Burroughs

Serve yourself, your children with the tools that seed intuitive thinking skills, books that challenge and enrich the imagination. Take them back to the time before the mind-controlling television and electronic games to the origins of the ideas that gave birth to these electronic miracles. - BOOKS that fuel the creative processes of the human imagination. Edgar Rice Burroughs was one such man and author that enriched the minds of many a person.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the world's most
popular authors. With no previous experience as an
author, he wrote and sold his first novel--'A Princess
of Mars' in 1912. In the ensuing thirty-eight years until
his death in 1950, Burroughs wrote ninety-one books
and a host of short stories and articles. Although best
known as the creator of the classic Tarzan of the Apes
and John Carter of Mars, his restless imagination knew
few bounds. Burroughs's prolific pen ranged from the
American West to primitive Africa and on to romantic
adventure on the moon, the planets, and even beyond
the farthest star.

No one knows how many copies of ERB books have
been published throughout the world. It is conservative
to say, however, that with the translations into
thirty-two known languages, including Braille, the
number must ran into the hundreds of millions. When
one considers the additional worldwide following of
the Tarzan newspaper feature, radio programs, comic
magazines, motion pictures, and television,
Burroughs must have been known and loved by literally
a thousand million or more.

Excerpt:

It must have been a little after three o'clock in the
afternoon that it happened---the afternoon of June 3rd,
1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed
through---all those weird and terrifying experiences
---should have been encompassed within so
short a span as three brief months. Rather might I
have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its changes
and evolutions for that which I have seen with my own
eyes in this brief interval of time---things that no other
mortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past,
a world dead, a world so long dead that even in the
lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains.

Fused
with the melting inner crust, it has passed forever
beyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket
of the earth whither fate has borne me and where my
doom is sealed. I am here and here must remain.
After reading this far, my interest, which already
had been stimulated by the finding of the manuscript,
was approaching the boiling-point.

I had come to
Greenland for the summer, on the advice of my physician, and was slowly being bored to extinction, as I
had thoughtlessly neglected to bring sufficient reading-
matter. Being an indifferent fisherman, my enthusiasm
for this form of sport soon waned; yet in the
absence of other forms of recreation I was now risking
my life in an entirely inadequate boat off Cape
Farewell at the southernmost extremity of Greenland.

Greenland! As a descriptive appellation, it is a
sorry joke---but my story has nothing to do with
Greenland, nothing to do with me; so I shall get
through with the one and the other as rapidly as possible.
The inadequate boat finally arrived at a precarious
landing, the natives, waist-deep in the surf, assisting.

I was carried ashore, and while the evening
meal was being prepared, I wandered to and fro
along the rocky, shattered shore. Bits of surf-harried
beach clove the worn granite, or whatever the rocks
of Cape Farewell may be composed of, and as I followed
the ebbing tide down one of these soft
stretches, I saw the thing.

Were one to bump into a
Bengal tiger in the ravine behind the Bimini Baths,
one could be no more surprised than was I to see a
perfectly good quart thermos bottle turning and twisting
in the surf of Cape Farewell at the southern extremity
of Greenland. I rescued it, but I was soaked
above the knees doing it; and then I sat down in the
sand and opened it, and in the long twilight read the
manuscript, neatly written and tightly folded, which
was its contents.

You have read the opening paragraph, and if you
are an imaginative idiot like myself, you will want to
read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here, omitting
quotation marks---which are difficult of remembrance. In two minutes you will forget me.

My home is in Santa Monica. I am, or was, junior
member of my father's firm. We are ship-builders.
Of recent years we have specialized on submarines,
which we have built for Germany, England, France
and the United States. I know a sub as a mother knows
her baby's face, and have commanded a score of them
on their trial runs. Yet my inclinations were all toward
aviation.

I graduated under Curtiss, and after a long
siege with my father obtained his permission to try
for the Lafayette Escadrille. As a stepping-stone I
obtained an appointment in the American ambulance
service and was on my way to France when three shrill
whistles altered, in as many seconds, my entire
scheme of life.

I was sitting on deck with some of the fellows who
were going into the American ambulance service with
me, my Airedale, Crown Prince Nobbler, asleep at
my feet, when the first blast of the whistle shattered
the peace and security of the ship. Ever since entering
the U-boat zone we had been on the lookout for
periscopes, and children that we were, bemoaning
the unkind fate that was to see us safely into France
on the morrow without a glimpse of the dread marauders.

We were young; we craved thrills, and God
knows we got them that day; yet by comparison with
that through which I have since passed they were as
tame as a Punch-and-Judy show.